Page 47 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

2018
What Maria Left Behind
Maria hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017, taking down the power grid and many cell towers. Yet by Monday, Oct. 2, faculty had returned to the Sagrado campus. By Thursday, Oct. 5, administrative staff was back. And by the following Monday, Oct. 11, the doors were reopened for students. Throughout that time, the university worked with its partner Dynamic Campus to get critical applications and data up and running on Amazon Web Services, including the ERP system, The College Board’s PowerFAIDS for financial aid, Moodle for remote and mobile learning, and Microsoft Active Directory for user account management.
Conditions weren’t ideal, but the university had a few posi- tives going for it, said President Gilberto J. Marxuach Torrós. First, backup generators were available at the student center, the student residences and a main building where the IT cen- ter was housed. Second, the dining hall was powered by gas rather than electricity, which meant the university could cook breakfast and lunch. Third, most campus structures were built in 1906, an era when air conditioning didn’t exist and electrici- ty was a rarity. As a result, a lot of the buildings “were designed for natural ventilation and natural illumination,” he said.
The university took advantage of what it had by turning “every available space” into classrooms, including porches, terraces, porticos, open spaces and hallways. Open tents were also set up to serve as learning spaces. “The classes took place in all of these alternate locations all over campus because our three main classroom buildings did not have backup genera- tors, and therefore we couldn’t use them,” said Marxuach.
The rest of the campus was without power until some- time in early November. And even then, the electrical infra- structure was unreliable, going on and off throughout the day with significant voltage fluctuations. So, Sagrado de- cided to stick with the alternative classrooms through the remainder of that semester.
Amazingly, the university, which is situated on a hill, never lost its cellular connectivity. “Not to say [the signal] was great,” cautioned Marxuach. “But it was one of the few plac- es where you could walk around campus with your mobile phone and find a spot where you got a connection and you could speak.” Service was intermittent, but people “could
speak for a minute or two before the call would drop. “Many people just came to our campus because it could serve as a place where they could get their things in order and plan their days,” he noted, “and that was really a great thing to see the community walk through our campus and use us as part of their recovery effort.”
Cell service wasn’t the only way the university helped its community. The basketball court was turned into a distri- bution center. Dozens of truckloads of goods arrived, and student volunteers would unload, count, inventory, separate and prepare the items for pick-up by community organiza- tions for distribution.4
Sagrado’s student center provided a gathering place for both students and faculty.
47
CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019